A French bank wants to try out the technology, which does not require consumers to be outfitted with new phones as NFC does, noted Eonnet.

BRED, part of the Banque Populaire cooperative banking group, plans to deploy up to 1,000 of Tagattitude’s TagPay terminals this year, probably targeting smaller supermarkets and other merchant locations in France, said Eonnet. He said several thousand more terminals are likely to be rolled out by the bank next year. BRED sees the technology as a way to capture transactions from unbanked consumers, whose phones need only come equipped with a ubiquitous microphone to conduct the transactions, not an NFC chip, said Eonnet.

“They want to deploy a complete approach of offering people an account, some type of bank account, that will link to a phone,” he told NFC Times. It’s like NFC, but they use any phone, and it’s totally independent from telecom operators.”

It's unclear how users would fund the m-payment accounts, however.

Eonnet calls the technology NSDT, short for Near Sound Data Transfer. For the BRED project, a retail clerk would enter the amount of purchase on a point-of-sale terminal and the consumer would then enter his phone number and a PIN code on the terminal keypad. The data is transferred to a BRED server, which then calls the consumer’s mobile phone. When the consumer answers, he holds the phone to the POS terminal, which emits a tone, synchronized to play after the consumer has answered. This is the onetime password for the transaction. The phone’s microphone picks up the tone from the terminal, and it’s sent back to the server to verify the “electronic signature.”

The technology could work with some conventional POS terminals, from Hong Kong-based PAX Technology and, later, from France-based Ingenico, with only software upgrades, Eonnet said. Other merchants will need new terminals.

An obvious question is whether TagPay transaction times, especially the extra communication between the consumer’s phone and the server, would slow things down in the checkout queue. Tone-based payment might also take some getting used to for consumers. With NFC, consumers tap, just as they do contactless cards used in many cities for transit ticketing and, to a lesser extent, retail payment–though in some markets, including France, it might require additional steps, especially for higher-value transactions.

Eonnet contends it takes only five seconds or less for a TagPay transaction. And mobile network coverage would not be a problem, either, he said. After all, the system works in developing countries in Africa and Latin America, where Tagattitude is in the process of building business, such as in Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Kenya.

Most of the population is unbanked in these countries. Tagattitude, which is funded by Innovacom, a venture capital firm started by France Telecom, will have a more difficult time establishing the technology in the developed world, especially France. French banks, including Banque Populaire itself, has expressed support for NFC.

Eonnet, who headed new applications for the smart card division of Schlumberger among other positions, keeps a close eye on NFC. While he predicts NFC might make it in the market, NFC-based payment will not.

“The value chain of payment cannot support the arrival of telecom operators and handset manufacturers,” he said. “That’s what breaks the value chain down.”

HEADLINE NEWS

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, plans to enable riders to enter subway gates by tapping contactless EMV credit cards and NFC wallets by the end of the year, working with Mastercard.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple released the number of global transactions for its Apple Pay service–believed to be the first time it has done so–as the tech giant touted a tripling of transactions to more than 1 billion for the latest quarter. Apple also disclosed plans by two more large U.S. retailers to accept contactless payments and announced that another major country, Germany, would support Apple Pay, later this year.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –SoftBank Group’s reported plans to launch a mobile digital payments service in Japan by year’s end–collaborating with Indian mobile payments provider Paytm–is an attempt by SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son to do what other large companies have tried and failed to do: wean Japanese consumers off of cash.

NFC TIMES EXCLUSIVE Insight – Hong Kong’s MTR Corp., which runs the city’s subway system, next month will accept tenders from technology and payments providers for a QR code-based fare collection service that will serve as an alternative to its much-used contactless Octopus card.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – NFC-based student ID cards provisioned to Apple Wallet beginning this fall won’t include the open-loop debit payments that are often part of plastic student ID cards, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Milan is the latest city to enable collection of fares by contactless bank cards and NFC phones, with public transport company Azienda Trasporti Milanesi, or ATM, rolling out the service to more than 100 stations on its metro system. The company plans to expand the open-loop payment service to buses and other surface transport modes it manages.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Google Pay launched today in Germany, making Google the first of the major backers of a Pays mobile wallet to launch service in the country. Yet, prospects for Google and any of the other international Pays that decide to launch in Europe’s largest economy are not promising.

NFC TIMES Exclusive –China’s major bank card network China UnionPay is badly losing the battle for mobile payments market share against Ant Financial and Tencent Holdings, and now the two Internet giants have turned their attention to enabling mobile transit ticketing across the country.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – HANOI, Vietnam: For several years, EasyCard Corp. of Taiwan has been seeking to enable its popular transit fare collection and retail e-money service for mobile and other digital payments, but it has hit several roadblocks along the way.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – HANOI, Vietnam: Since Apple Pay launched in Japan in the fall of 2016, the number of users for the Mobile Suica transit and retail payments application has grown by 50%, although the vast majority of transactions for Suica are still conducted with cards.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple will enable colleges and universities to add NFC-based student ID cards to its Wallet with OS upgrades to its Apple Watch and iPhone, the tech giant announced Monday on the opening day of its Worldwide Developers Conference.